Pilots and employment Two papers about AI got a lot of attention this week. First, a group at MIT claimed that it had done a survey showing that 95% of corporate AI pilots fail. Second, the HAI lab at Stanford used a detailed dataset of US employment over the last three years to argue that entry level programming jobs have declined sharply. See this week's column. EMPLOYMENT, PILOTS Google Nano Banana Yes, that's really the product name. Google released a new image generation model that shot to the top of most benchmarks. I'm old enough to remember when Google was supposedly unable to do AI (Bard, anyone?) - there remain lots of questions about Google's role in the new world (how do ads work?) but no-one is comparing Sundar Pichai to Steve Ballmer this week. LINK Microsoft's independence Microsoft is slowly working its way towards having credible LLMs of its own, instead of just relying on OpenAI (a lucrative but painful relationship), and this week the AI group, led by Mustafa Suleyman (cofounder of DeepMind), released its first foundation model, MAI-1. It came in at number 15 on the LMArena leaderboard (one of many imperfect ways to evaluate), which in crude terms puts it at par with the SOTA of six months ago. LINK The week in Anthropic Anthropic released an abuse report on ways that it found bad people doing bad things with its products. Welcome to the internet. LINK It also changed its T&Cs to allow include user input as training data unless you opt out. LINK And, Anthropic launched a Chrome extension. The trend to try to add LLM assistants to web browsers reminds me a lot of Internet Explorer toolbars 25 years ago (an important part of Google's early growth story), except that these days most use is on mobile, where this is irrelevant. LINK Chaos and the end of de minimis I've written a few times about de minimis, the customs rule that, in the USA, exempted packages worth under $800 from inspection and duties. This got a lot of attention in the last couple of years because it enabled the direct shipment model used by Shein and Temu, and the on-demand manufacturing that lets Shein sell an order of magnitude more SKUs than conventional fast fashion retailers. It was clear that this had got out of hand: most countries use $200 (the US increased from that to $800 in 2016), and the US was going to end the rule in summer 2027. However, Donald Trump ended the exemption entirely for China and HK in May and then on 30 July extended that to all countries, giving only one month's notice, meaning today. This has created chaos. Narrowly, there were 1.4bn of these shipments last year and US does not have the customs systems to inspect or charge duties on all of them (which is a major reason for having the rule in the first place) and can't build them in a month. So, a range of post offices around the world have halted package shipments to the USA entirely, since they don't know where to send them. But more generally, in the last decade a lot of companies built their ecommerce logistics chains around this. For example, Tapestry (which owns Coach and Kate Spade) has 13-14% of sales affected, since it was fulfilling D2C orders direct from outside the USA, and this was also the final straw for Ssense, a luxury reseller in Canada that just went bankrupt. Making things worse, no-one knows how the new rules work yet: if you buy a watch from Germany, do you pay the 'EU Import' tariff, or do you also have to pay the 'copper imports' tariff on the copper content? LINK, POST OFFICES, COACH, SSENSE Musk suing Apple Elon Musk says he's going to sue Apple because his 'Grok' LLM app (the one that called itself 'MechaHitler') isn't at the top of the App Store charts (it isn't at the top of the AI benchmarks either, nor Google Trends, nor web traffic). Of course, anyone who's been paying attention for the last decade will recall that there is very little predictive value in things that Elon Musk says he will do. LINK Pattern aggregation Pattern is an aggregation platform that sells products from over 200 partner brands across all the marketplaces you can think of. Revenue last year was $1.8bn, and it just filed for IPO. LINK | 
No comments:
Post a Comment